Loan Mods Plunge at Largest National Banks

WASHINGTON — Loan modification activity has fallen dramatically at national banks over the past year, according to a report released Wednesday by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The seven largest national banks completed 35,642 loan modifications in the third quarter of 2016, down from 147,542 in the same quarter in 2015, the Mortgage Metrics report said.

Meanwhile, the percentage of seriously delinquent loans (those 90 days or more past due) had fallen to 2.2% at Sept. 30 from 2.6% a year earlier.

"The overall performance of mortgages … continues to improve from a year earlier," the OCC said.

The OCC report culls data from Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Mortgage data from OneWest, Pasadena, Calif., which was acquired by the CIT Group last year, was also included in OCC data through the fourth quarter of 2015.

The OCC said the seven banks initiated 47,955 new foreclosures in the third quarter, a 25.3% decrease from a year earlier.

The seven banks' servicing portfolios, meanwhile, have been shrinking over the past two years due to the runoff of subprime, alternative-A and other nonprime loans.

Overall, the servicing portfolios totaled $3.5 trillion in the third quarter, down from nearly $4 trillion in the third quarter of 2014.

14-Day Free Trial

The increasing adoption of virtual card payments by accounts payable departments has created an unex­pected complication for suppliers: more friction in the processing, posting and reconciliation of payments and receivables. The root of the problem is that most suppliers rely on a manual approach to processing e-mailed virtual card payments. Suppliers are forced to balance their organization’s need for operational efficiency and control with rising customer demand to pay with a virtual card. But a new breed of tech­nology enables suppliers to process virtual card payments straight-through, addressing the needs of buyers and suppliers. This paper details the growth of electronic business-to-business (B2B) payments, shows how manual approaches to processing virtual card payments cause friction in accounts receivables, describes a way to process virtual card payments straight-through, and highlights the benefits of friction­less payments.